Category Archives: personal digital archiving

Edith, Policy and Planning Fellow at Bodleian Libraries, writes about her favourite features in ePADD (an open source software for email archives) and about how the tool aligns with digital preservation workflows.

At iPres a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending an ePadd workshop ran by Josh Schneider from Stanford University Libraries. The workshop was for me one of the major highlights of the conference, as I have been keen to try out ePADD since first hearing about it at DPC’s Email Preservation Day. I wrote a blog about the event back in July, and have now finally taken the time to review ePADD using my own email archive.

ePADD is primarily for appraisal and delivery, rather than a digital preservation tool. However, as a potential component in ingest workflows to an institutional repository, ensuring that email content retains integrity during processing in ePADD is paramount. The creators behind ePADD are therefore thinking about how to enhance current features to make the tool fit better into digital preservation workflows. I will discuss these features later in the blog, but first I wanted to show some of the capabilities of ePADD. I can definitely recommend having a play with this tool yourself as it is very addictive!

ePADD: Appraisal module dashboard

Josh, our lovely workshop leader, recommends that new ePADD users go home and try it on their own email collections. As you know your own material fairly well it is a good way of learning about both what ePADD does well and its limits. So I decided to feed in my work emails from the past year into ePADD – and found some interesting trends about my own working patterns.

ePADD consists of four modules, although I will only be showing features from the first two in this blog:

Module 1: Appraisal (Module used by donors for annotation and sensitivity review of emails before delivering them to the archive)

Module 2: Processing (A module with some enhanced appraisal features used by archivist to find additional sensitive information which may have been missed in the first round of appraisal)

Module 4: Delivery (This module provides more enhanced viewing of the content of the email archive – including a gallery for viewing images and other document attachments)

Note that ePADD only support MBOX files, so if you are an Outlook user like myself you will need to first convert from PST to MBOX. After you have created an MBOX file, setting up ePADD is fairly simple and quick. Once the first ePADD module (“Appraisal”) was up and running, processing my 1,500 emails and 450 attachments took around four minutes. This time includes time for natural language processing. ePADD recognises and indexes various “entities” – including persons, places and events – and presents these in a digestible way.

ePADD: Appraisal module processing MBOX file

Looking at the entities recognised by ePADD, I was able to see who I have been speaking with/about during the past year. There were some not so surprising figures that popped up (such as my DPOC colleagues James Mooney and Dave Gerrard). However, curiously I seem to also have received a lot of messages about the “black spider” this year (turns out they were emails from the Libraries’ Dungeons and Dragons group).

ePADD entity type: Person (some details removed)

An example of why you need to look deeper at the results of natural language processing was evident when I looked under the “place entities” list in ePADD:

ePADD entity type: Place

San Francisco comes highest up on the list of mentioned places in my inbox. I was initially quite surprised by this result. Looking a bit closer, all 126 emails containing a mention of San Francisco turned out to be from “Slack”. Slack is an instant messaging service used by the DPOC team, which has its headquarters in San Francisco. All email digests from Slack contains the head office address!

Another one of my favourite things about ePADD is its ability to track frequency of messages between email accounts. Below is a graph showing correspondence between myself and Sarah Mason (outreach and training fellow on the DPOC project). The graph shows that our peak period of emailing each other was during the PASIG conference, which DPOC hosted in Oxford at the start of September this year. It is easy to imagine how this feature could be useful to academics using email archives to research correspondence between particular individuals.

ePADD displaying correspondence frequency over time between two users

The last feature I wanted to talk about is “sensitivity review” in ePADD. Although I annotate personal data I receive, I thought that the one year mark of the DPOC project would also be a good time to run a second sensitivity review of my own email archive. Using ePADD’s “lexicon hits search” I was able to sift through a number of potentially sensitive emails. See image below for categories identified which cover everything from employment to health. These were all false positives in the end, but it is a feature I believe I will make use of again.

ePADD processing module: Lexicon hits for sensitive data

So now on to the Digital Preservation bit. There are currently three risks of using ePADD in terms of preservation which stands out to me.

1) For practical reasons, MBOX is currently the only email format option supported by ePADD. If MBOX is not the preferred preservation format of an archive it may end up running multiple migrations between email formats resulting in progressive loss of data

2) There are no checksums being generated when you download content from an ePADD module in order to copy it onto the next one. This could be an issue as emails are copied multiple times without monitoring of the integrity of the email archive files occurring

3) There is currently limited support for assigning multiple identifiers to archives in ePADD. This could potentially become an issue when trying to aggregate email archives from different intuitions. Local identifiers could in this scenario clash and other additional unique identifiers would then also be required

Note however that these concerns are already on the ePADD roadmap, so they are likely to improve or even be solved within the next year.

To watch out for ePADD updates, or just have a play with your own email archive (it is loads of fun!), check out their:

Sarah has recently been testing scenarios to investigate the question of changes in file ‘date created’ and ‘last modified’ metadata. When building training, it’s always best to test out what your advice before giving it and below is the result of Sarah’s research with helpful screenshots.

Before doing some training that involved teaching better recordkeeping habits to staff, I ran some tests to be sure that I was giving the right advice when it came to created and last modified dates. I am often told by people in the field that these dates are always subject to change—but are they really? I knew I would tell staff to put created dates in file names or in document headers in order to retain that valuable information, but could the file maintain the correct embedded date anyways? I set out to test a number of scenarios on both my Mac OS X laptop and Windows desktop.

Scenario 1: Downloading from cloud storage (Google Drive)

This was an ALL DATES change for both Mac OS X and Windows.

Scenario 2: Uploading to cloud storage (Google Drive)

Once again this was an ALL DATES change for both systems.

Note:I trialled this a second time with the Google Drive for PC application and in OS X and found that created and last modified dates do not change when the file is uploaded or downloaded the Google Drive folder on the PC. However, when in Google Drive via the website, the created date is different (the date/time of upload), though the ‘file info’ will confirm the date has not changed. Just to complicate things.

Scenario 3: Transfer from a USB

Mac OS X had no change to the dates. Windows showed an altered created date, but maintained the original last modified date.

Scenario 4: Transfer to a USB

Once again there was no change of a dates in the Mac OS X. Windows showed an altered created date, but maintained the original last modified date.

Note: I looked into scenarios 3 and 4 for Windows a bit further and saw that Robocopy is an option as a command prompt that will allow directories to be copied across and maintains those date attributes. I copied a ‘TEST’ folder containing the file from the Windows computer to the USB, and back again. It did what was promised and there were no changes to either dates in the file. It is a bit annoying that an extra step is required (that many people would find technically challenging and therefore avoid).

Scenario 5: Moving between folders

No change across either systems. This was a relief for me considering how often I move files around my directories.

Conclusions

When in doubt (and you should always be in doubt), test the scenario. Even when I tested these scenarios three of four times, it did not always come out with the same result. That alone should make one cautious. I still stick to putting created date in the file name and in the document itself (where possible), but it doesn’t meant I always receive documents that way.

Creating a zip of files/folders before transfer is one method of preserving dates, but I had some weird issues trying to unzip the file in cloud storage that took a few tries before the dates remained preserved. It is also possible to use Quickhash for transferring files unchanged (and it generates a checksum).

I ignored the last accessed date during testing, because it was too easy to accidentally double-click a file and change it (as you can see happened to my Windows 7 test version).

Has anyone tested any other scenarios to assess when file dates are altered? Does anyone have methods for transferring files without causing any change to dates?

Outreach & Training Fellow, Sarah, has officially begun training and capacity building with session on personal digital archiving at the Bodleian Libraries. Below Sarah shares how the first session went and shares some personal digital archiving tips.

Early Tuesday morning and the Weston Library had just opened to readers. I got to town earlier than usual, stopping to get a Melbourne-style flat white at one of my favourite local cafes – to get in me in the mood for public speaking. By 9am I was in the empty lecture theatre, fussing over cords, adjusting lighting and panicking of the fact I struggled to log in to the laptop.

At 10am, twenty-one interested faces were seated with pens at the ready; there was nothing else to do but take a deep breath and begin.

In the 1.5 hour session, I covered the DPOC project, digital preservation and personal digital archiving. The main section of the training was learning about personal digital archiving, preservation lifecycle and the best practice steps to follow to save your digital stuff!

The steps of the Personal Digital Archiving & Preservation Lifecycle are intended to help with keeping your digital files organised, findable and accessible over time. It’s not prescriptive advice, but it is a good starting point for better habits in your personal and work lives. Below are tips for every stage of the lifecycle that will help build better habits and preserve your valuable digital files.

Keep Track and Manage:

Know where your digital files are and what digital files you have: make a list of all of the places you keep your digital files

find out what is on your storage media – check the label, read the file and folder names, open the file to see the content

Most importantly: delete or dispose of things you no longer need.

This includes: things with no value, duplicates, blurry images, previous document versions (if not important) and so on.

Organise:

Use best practice for file naming:

No spaces, use underscores _ and hyphens – instead

Put ‘Created Date’ in the file name using yyyymmdd format

Don’t use special characters <>,./:;'”\|[]()!@£$%^&*€#`~

Keep the name concise and descriptive

Use a version control system for drafts (e.g. yyyymmdd_documentname_v1.txt)

Use best practice for folder naming;

Concise and descriptive names

Use dates where possible (yyyy or yyyymmdd)

keep file paths short and avoid a deep hierarchy

Choose structures that are logical to you and to others

To rename large groups of image files, consider using batch rename software

Describe:

Add important metadata directly into the body of a text document

creation date & version dates

author(s)

title

access rights & version

a description about the purpose or context of the document

Create a README.txt file of metadata for document collections

Be sure to list the folder names and file names to preserve the link between the metadata and the text file

include information about the context of the collection, dates, subjects and relevant information

this is a quick method for creating metadata around digital image collections

Embed the metadata directly in the file

for image and video: be sure to add subjects, location and a description of the trip or event

Add tags to documents and images to aid discoverability

Consider saving the ‘Creation Date’ in the file name, a free text field in the metadata, in the document header or in a README text file if it is important to you. In some cases transferring the file (copying to new media, uploading to cloud storage) will change the creation date and the original date will be lost. The same goes for saving as a different file type. Always test before transfer or ‘Save As’ actions or record the ‘Creation Date’ elsewhere.

refresh your storage media every three to five years to protect against loss of hardware failure

do annual spot checks, including checking all backups. This will help check for any loss, corruption or damaged backups. Also consider checking all of the different file types in your collection, to ensure they are still accessible, especially if not saved in a recommended long-term file format.

Even I can admit I need better personal archiving habits. How many photographs are still on my SD cards, waiting for transfer, selection/deletion and renaming before saving in a few choice safe backup locations? The answer is: too many.

Perhaps now that my first training session is over, I should start planning my personal side projects. I suspect clearing my backlog of SD cards is one of them.